


Sentinel

by RainySpringMorning



Category: Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Genre: Dawnguard, Enemies to Friends, F/M, Female Anti-Hero, Mod-Based (see notes), Post-Thieves Guild Arc, vampire
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-17
Updated: 2015-01-17
Packaged: 2018-03-07 22:05:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3184904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RainySpringMorning/pseuds/RainySpringMorning
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mercer Frey is now a Nightingale Sentinel serving Nocturnal in her realm of Evergloam. Through a deal made between his mistress and his murderer, Mercer now serves the latter through some very strained conditions.</p><p>The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim belongs to Bethesda Game Studios! All original characters and content is mine.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sentinel

**Author's Note:**

> This story is based on Ilhe's "Freedom for Nightingales" mod, available on the Steam Workshop and Skyrim Nexus. I recommend giving it a try!

It’s been weeks, years, months, days – he doesn’t know. In the void of Nocturnal’s realm of Evergloam, a sentinel can do nothing but pace and stand and watch the shadows flutter by. It’s _boring_. The only time it ever gets exciting is when he’s summoned to the side of his killer, the former-Nightingale herself.

Mercer wants to butcher her. He wants to laugh as he does it, feel her red blood leak across his fingers and watch her eyes roll into her skull as she breathes her last. He wants to rip the smile off her face that appears whenever she calls him to her aid. He tries to, when she isn’t looking. Unfortunately for him, it means he disappears back into the dark realm to await another taste of freedom. She is his freedom, his jailer holding the keys. It’s excruciating.

Being pulled from shadow to a tangible presence is… as odd as it is eerie. Mercer can feel the wind pushing against him, reminding him of the days when he lived. He misses the touch of grass, the weight of a coin purse, the sound of gems tinkling together like silver bells. The hunt, the chase, the prize. He wants it back, but is forced to wait, and only permitted to follow when he returns to his old world.

She calls him sometimes at the strangest of hours. Sometimes it’s in Honeyside while she’s leaning over the cooking pot, requesting him to bring a few leeks from the produce barrel. Other times it’s at the end of a battle, when he finds her wiping her blade clean and grinning cockily at him. He is only allowed to do as much when she allows it. Sometimes she lets him feel the crunch of leaves beneath his boots; smell the tang of white-hot metal being pounded and shaped into a new blade. She never lets him get close enough to slice her throat open. He’s folding painfully into the shadows, her angered eyes glaring after him as he falls.

Mercer doesn’t know why she bothers calling him to her. She murdered him – gods, he tried to murder her. He isn’t impressed by her actions, nor her final words to him: _To blazes with Nocturnal. I’m here for the eyes!_ Still, he hadn’t expected to see the glimmer of his own reflection in her walk, the shadow of her smirks, the way she clung to riches like they were her life force. All for herself.

She gave up her position as Nightingale, spat on Nocturnal’s contract and upon the Guild itself. Left the position of guild master to Brynjolf and disappeared without so much a note to explain her absence. She didn’t miss them, she’d told Mercer. There’s more to life than kissing Maven Black-Briar’s arse or recruiting dimwitted fools who didn’t even know the proper end to a lockpick. _I want to see the world and rob it blind_ she’d crowed at the top of a mountain peak. Even then, Mercer could have shoved her off had he tried hard enough. He didn’t. He just stared at her, trying to decipher the woman who was once a scraggly girl in ragged clothes with knotted hair and a muddy face. The poor robber. The pinch-penny beggar.

The day she’d walked in, grubbier and smellier than a troll and head-to-toe in ticks, Mercer had ordered her out. Told Brynjolf to take her down to the lake and scrub her until she was bleeding. He’d brought her back and Mercer realized that under all that muck had been an eighteen year old Breton. He’d let her in, never knew why at the time, but never failed to have a bad feeling about her whenever she returned from the increasingly dangerous missions she was sent on. Nothing seemed to bring her down, or smother that glow in her eye.

Mercer had been so close, so terribly close. He knew everyone’s habits, where everyone was at every moment, how much coin was coming in and going straight into his pockets. Signing those letters off and changing the odd number in the ledgers, pushing bit by bit of coin into a fund. He had his connections in the south, was ridding of those both north and west. He’d pulled the blinds over Brynjolf’s eyes, would have dealt with him before the end. An accident he would have said. A _slip-up_ on the job. The same for old Mallory too. Couldn’t have any loose ends, after all. The rest of the guild would have rotted away within a few months, maybe by the following spring.

And Mercer would be a whole province away, pillaging mansions and bedding wives, living the life as a kleptomaniac with no one to stop him.

She just had to have walked in and pull on the first strings of his perfect, intricately-designed plan. The bitch.

But now, standing beside her overlooking a castle swarming with vampires, the icy wind blowing off the sea just strong enough for Mercer to feel its shivering force, it’s like his thoughts are no longer his own. Every curl of his fingers, every illusion of breath – it’s all hers. She looks at him with eyes like hot coals and smiles, a sad little smile, the smile she’d give him every day until _that_ day. He can still smell the cold stillness of the ruin; see her paralyzed form lying on the stone, her eyes shifting fearfully to find him hovering over her. The one time she couldn’t smile. He doesn’t know why she does now. Maybe if she tries hard enough, Mercer will smile too.

He is, after all, hers.


End file.
